Richard Evans Schultes—ethnobotanist, taxonomist, writer, photographer, and Harvard professor—is regarded as one of the most important plant explorers of the twentieth century. In 1941, Schultes traveled to the Amazon rainforest on a mission to study how Indigenous peoples used plants for medicinal, ritual, and practical purposes. A new interactive online map, produced by the Amazon Conservation Team, traces the landscapes and cultures that Schultes explored in the Colombian Amazon. Plotkin and Hettler shared this map and discussed the relevance of Schultes’ travels and collections for science, conservation, and education in the twenty-first century.
About the Speakers
- Mark Plotkin, Co-Founder & President, The Amazon Conservation Team
- Brian Hettler, GIS & New Technologies Manager, The Amazon Conservation Team
Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist and conservationist who has focused on the plants and peoples of the Amazon since the late 1970s. A former student of the renowned ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, Plotkin is well known for his bestselling book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice and the Academy Award-nominated IMAX film Amazon. Plotkin is President and a board member of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT). He previously served as a vice president of Conservation International and as U.S. Director of Plant Conservation at the World Wildlife Fund. Previously, he was a research associate in ethnobotanical conservation at the Harvard University Herbaria. He received his education at Harvard, Yale, and Tufts universities.
Brian Hettler is a cartographer with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) who works with Indigenous communities in South America on participatory mapping initiatives that support Indigenous land rights and rainforest conservation. For the past six years, Brian has been leading ACT’s efforts to map and monitor isolated Indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest—and the many threats facing these vulnerable communities—using high-resolution satellite imagery provided by DigitalGlobe. When not in the field, Brian partakes in a range of projects including monitoring forest covering using remote-sensing techniques, designing maps in both static and interactive digital formats, and supporting ACT’s field staff and Indigenous partners in the innovative use of spatial data collection and monitoring tools.
Presented in collaboration with Harvard Museum of Natural History, the Amazon Conservation Team and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Reception supported by the Harvard Chapter of Sigma Xi.
Recorded 2/20/19
Transcript
The Amazonian Travels of Richard Evans Schultes
[00:00:06.94] We're delighted to have Mark Plotkin and Brian Hettler with us tonight to discuss the Amazonian travels of renowned, and he really is renowned. Anyone who's famous in song and legend, it's this guy. Renowned ethnobotanist and Harvard professor, Richard Evans Schultes, and a new interactive map they have developed that traces the landscapes and cultures that Schultes explored in the Colombian Amazon.
[00:00:35.11] This program is being live streamed on the museum's Facebook page. And I'd like to give a warm welcome to our virtual participants. Hi out there in Facebookland.
[00:00:45.64] [APPLAUSE]
[00:00:46.99] Right, yeah. Too bad you're not here, but we're glad you're here. This is a good time to quickly text your friends and let them know that they can join us on Facebook. And after you do that, please turn off your cell phones.
[00:01:00.28] If you're not done so already, please be sure to pick up a copy of our new program guide at the table to my right, your left, which features all of our events, classes, and exhibits. At the table, you can also find information on how to become a museum member, which provides admission for all of our museums and also helps support our mission to bring you public educational programs like this one that you're about to hear tonight.
[00:01:24.97] After the program, please join us in the galleries of the Harvard Museum of Natural History for a reception sponsored by the Harvard chapter of Sigma Chi. I'd especially like to thank Kathy Jones, who is with us tonight, for supporting this event.
[00:01:37.48] It's now my pleasure to introduce tonight's speakers. Dr. Mark Plotkin is president and co-founder of the Amazon Conservation Team. He's an ethnobotanist and conservationist who has studied the plants and peoples of the Amazon since the late 1970s. Mark has many ties to Harvard. He worked at the Museum of Comparative Zoology for four years. He was a research associate at the Botanical Museum, which is now the Harvard University Herbaria, and completed his undergraduate degree through the Harvard Extension School, later co-teaching an extension course on rainforest conservation with Dr. Schultes.
[00:02:13.75] He's perhaps best known for his bestselling book, "Tales of the Shaman's Apprentice" and through the Academy Award nominated IMAX film, Amazon. Mark previously served as vice president of Conservation International and as director of plant conservation at the World Wildlife Fund US. He received his master's degree in forest science from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and his PhD in biological conservation from Tufts University.
[00:02:42.73] Brian Hettler is a cartographer with the Amazon Conservation Team. He works with indigenous communities in South America on participatory mapping initiatives that support indigenous land rights and rainforest preservation conservation.
[00:02:59.61] For the past six years, Brian has been leading efforts to map and monitor isolated indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest and the many threats facing these vulnerable communities. He partakes in a range of projects including monitoring forest covering using remote sensing techniques, designing maps in both static and interactive digital formats, and supporting field staff and indigenous partners in the innovative use of spatial data collection and monitoring tools. He also creates interactive map-based digital stories designed to raise awareness of Amazonian cultures and ecosystems and the many external threats they currently face.
[00:03:37.44] Brian received his undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College and his master's degree in landscape architecture from the State University of New York. Please join me in welcoming Mark and Brian. Thank you.
[00:03:48.30] [APPLAUSE]
[00:03:55.66] Thank you, Jeff, and thank all of you for coming out on a cold Cambridge night, and I can promise you, we're headed for warmer climes! But we have a special guest to start the evening off, Dr. Schultes Dr. Neil Schultes, son of Richard Evans Schultes, a well-known scientist in his own right and a Harvard graduate.
[00:04:13.62] [APPLAUSE]
[00:04:22.12] Thank you, Mark. I'd really like to thank Mark and Brian and all the members of the Amazon Conservation Team for putting together a fantastic website. If you haven't been there, please do go and see it. And for me, it's very personal because it brings back memories from my childhood. This is what I was brought up on.
[00:04:44.91] Now, during the late '30s and '40s and '50s when my father was doing most of his expeditions in South America, he would often take time to go and retrace the steps of previous famous explorers, like Koch-Grunberg in the early 1900s or Richard Spruce even earlier in the 1860s. Now, he did this for scientific reasons and found lots of plants and things that they had run across. But I think he had a sense of homage and devotion to these explorers of a previous time.
[00:05:19.54] Now that he's among the ancients of the explorers, his students are doing the same thing. And I want to thank all of the students for going through and retracing his steps. He would be very, very pleased to see this.
[00:05:37.11] I just want to finish with saying that my father was placed among the ancients during his latter years. And he always had a quip when he was introduced as the father of ethnobotany. He would say, well, you know, it's been around since before the pharaohs, and I'm not that old yet. Thank you, Mark.
[00:06:00.53] [APPLAUSE]
[00:06:06.96] Thank you, Neil. I want to thank the museum. I want to thank Jeff and Diana and Brian Farrell. And I've got to say, it's good to be home. I spent eight of the most important years of my life here when I wasn't in the jungle. And I'm sure you can agree with me without a doubt: this is the most important institution here at Harvard University!
[00:06:25.17] I also have a vision of addressing three audiences tonight-- one of the people who knew and loved Schultes like I did. I know there are people that knew of him or maybe took some of his classes, and that whole Facebook audience out there of maybe people who didn't know Schultes, but it's our job, Brian and mine, to introduce him in a way you may not otherwise have a chance to do. So I want to give a special shout out to Siri von Reis, who is perhaps Schultes' first graduate student, who is tuning in tonight via Facebook.
[00:06:57.06] And to start the lecture off, I want to give you sort of a 360 review of who Schultes was because I'm going to spend some time telling you who I thought he was and what his legacy was. But I want to talk about what other people thought of Schultes, such as some of the faculty members.
[00:07:11.82] And the way I want to do that is to quote my friend and colleague, Dr. Paul Cox, a fellow ethnobotanist who started you around the same time I did. And he came to Harvard looking for a PhD advisor. And in talking to some of the other faculty here at Harvard, he was told... whatever you do, stay away from Richard Evans Schultes. He spent a decade alone in the Amazon. He's a dinosaur. He's dangerous to otherwise good students!
[00:07:45.82] Now, at this point in time, there was a lot of tumult on the Harvard campus. The Vietnam War was raging. Protests were raging. So let me show you what he looked like to undergraduate students. For us, he was a hero in an age without heroes. This is a time where we were being told distrust authority. Don't trust anybody over 40. And Wade Davis, fellow ethnobotanist and one of Schultes' biographers regarded him as the ultimate hero on campus.
[00:08:12.40] So let me tell you what Latinos thought of him because I worked mostly in Latin America. And about 35 years ago, there was the first ethnobotany conference actually held in Latin America. It was in Mexico. And the focus of the conference was not just ethnobotany, but it's like, we have to do our own research on our own plants and our own indigenous peoples. These "pinche gringos" keep coming here and doing all this research. And then when the proceedings came out, this was the dedication-- "A Richard Evans Schultes, qiue abrio el camino... To Richard Evans Schultes, who opened the path!"
[00:08:51.33] But most important of all, what do the Indians, so-called, what do the indigenous peoples think of Schultes? And I have been to Anadarko, Oklahoma, where he first studied peyote. I lived in Oaxaca, where he studied the mushrooms. I've spent decades going back and forth to the Colombian Amazon.
[00:09:11.70] And what I heard time and time again from the indigenous peoples was Schultes was the first white person we met who not only treated us with respect, but actually wanted to learn from us. By our side, he danced our sacred dances, ate our peyote, chewed our coca, and drink our ayahuasca. We loved him.
[00:09:37.69] So here is where I got started on a September night in 1974. I came wandering into the Botanical Museum next door. And I found this elderly, kind, conservative, gentleman in a white lab coat and a red Harvard tie. And I did not realize at the time I was meeting the most subversive person in Harvard Square.
[00:10:00.43] Schultes was a shapeshifter and a trickster in the best and most positive sense of the word. What was his lesson? Distrust authority. Question science. Learn from people, who at the time, many people in Harvard looked down upon these preliterate cultures. And so I walked into that classroom, and this is what I saw. And Schultes turned out the light and began to work his magic. And there's one slide he showed that night, and it changed my life forever. He gave a very famous lecture on the botany and chemistry of plant hallucinogens.
[00:10:35.62] And he put up this slide, and he said, here you see three Yucuna Indians of the Colombian Amazon doing the Kai-ya-ree dance to keep away the forces of darkness. The one on the right has a Harvard degree. Next slide, please. And it was that slide that made me fall in love with plants, peoples, and the rainforest.
[00:10:59.36] So this is where he began in a house that still stands in 276 Lexington Street in east Boston. Because you have to think of Schultes as the quintessential outsider. He was a man, Boston born and bred, who was a tenured professor at Harvard.
[00:11:12.71] But he was never quite what he seemed. He was an outsider. He grew up in east Boston. It was an Irish and an Italian ghetto. He was a descendant of English and German stock. He was an outsider in east Boston. And what great training to live amongst people different than yourself and be able to get along and make friends. What great training to become an ethnobotanist!
[00:11:35.93] Here is a picture taken behind that house-- thank you, Neil Schultes for this picture. This is the first-ever picture taken of Richard Evans Schultes at the age one on his father's lap. And I think we can safely say that this is the first ever picture of Richard Evans Schultes looking at plants!
[00:11:51.43] [LAUGHTER]
[00:11:55.38] When Schultes was eight, he got a terrible internal ailment and was confined to bed for months and months and months. So to keep his child interested and to educate him, Otto Schultes went to the east Boston Public Library four blocks away and checked out Richard Spruce "Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes." And this is Spruce on the left, and this is ayahuasca on the right. And knowing that Schultes heard these stories at the age of eight meant he was certainly the youngest person in east Boston learning about the Amazon and certainly the youngest person anywhere outside of tribal cultures who was learning about ayahuasca.
[00:12:38.39] Here's what Schultes looked like when he entered Harvard in 1933 as a young, poor, nerd. He was interested in studying medicine, so he went to the Botanical Museum. At the time, botany and medicine were greatly intertwined. As a poor kid on a scholarship, he had to work his way through Harvard, and he became interested in these stories of plants and people and the birth of civilization and culture and consciousness.
[00:13:07.40] And the director of this museum at the time was Oakes Ames, who is the world's leading orchidologist, who was the head of the Botanical Museum. And he gave a very famous course that Neil and I took, and probably some other people here, Bio 104, Plants and Human Affairs.
[00:13:25.16] And at the end of one of the classes, Ames told his students, for this class, you must do a term paper, and you must base it on one of the books on the shelf in the back. Schultes being a work study student had a lot less time available than all the rich kids who were in the class with him.
[00:13:40.25] So he made a beeline to the back of the class and grabbed the smallest, shortest, book available. And here is that book from the Harvard Library, the actual copy of the book that Schultes found on mescal and peyote. And 40 years later, he could still recall the wonder of reading about this incredible cactus and the visions it inspired.
[00:14:02.00] So great was the term paper that Schultes wrote that Ames reached into his pocket and paid for Schultes and another anthropology student to go west to study peyote in situ to amongst the Kiowa peoples in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Now, Schultes had never been west of the Hudson.
[00:14:21.67] This is the teepee into which he entered. And he and LaBarre spent a night in there with the road men, with the shamans taking the sacred cactus. And here's a picture of Schultes and LaBarre the morning after. Now, they've been taking peyote all night. And here is LaBarre on the right who looks like he can't wait to get to sleep. And there there's the road man, the shaman in the middle.
[00:14:48.26] And there's Schultes. He's taken peyote all night, and he's not only wearing a tie, he's wearing a tie clip. How much of a nerd can you be? But his mind was expanded. His cosmo vision was open. And it set him on the path of ethnobotany.
[00:15:05.35] So let me show you how this nerdy, poor kid transitioned to these magical plants to become the uber ethno jungle botanist, and who was portrayed in part by people like Sean Connery and Harrison Ford as the archetype of the jungle explorer. And let me tell you how he got there before we get to the map.
[00:15:29.95] He headed south after he did his peyote studies as an undergraduate to study teonanacatl. This was a magic mushroom, or a rumored magic mushroom that the Indians of southern Mexico were supposedly taking as a sacrament. And Schultes successfully found the mushroom, documented the ceremony. And in some ways, it led to the 1960s.
[00:15:51.89] So on the left, you see the guide to magic mushrooms by my buddy, Dennis McKenna, and on the right, you see the pictures of those mushrooms from my friend John Allen. But there's an under told story of what came out of this.
[00:16:03.46] About 30 years ago, Albert Hoffman, the chemist who synthesized LSD, was having dinner in Switzerland with Schultes and his wife Dorothy, Neil's mom. And Dorothy took some pills out of her purse. And Hoffman looked at the bottle, and he said, oh, Visken, a beta blocker. He said Dorothy, did you know that these beta blockers are all of a class that I synthesized and I did it in part based on the compounds extracted from the magic mushrooms collected amongst the Mazatec by your husband?
[00:16:35.31] So when you went into Schultes' office at the Botanical Museum, there were two pictures over his shoulder that summed up his career and his approach, and then it inspired biocultural conservation as it's done around the world today. On the left were two of Yucuna peoples snuffing. On the right was the Lost World mountains of Chiribiquete. So on the left was culture, indigenous culture. On the right was nature. This is where biocultural conservation comes out of, and this is where our organization, the Amazon Conservation Team, got its inspiration.
[00:17:13.03] Today, we have worked with 55 tribes to map, manage, and improve protection of 80 million acres of ancestral lands, all inspired by Schultes' example. Of course, as I said, the museum complex here is the most important building on the Harvard campus. And let me tell you why that is.
[00:17:34.87] It was established in 1859 by Louis Agassiz. Louis Agassiz was a Swiss scientist who came to Boston in 1847, and in a sense never left. He became the most beloved scientist of his time. He became the most famous teacher of his time, the greatest lecturer at Harvard. And the museum was built with funds he raised right here in Boston.
[00:17:56.02] But he had two fatal flaws in terms of his career and his reputation. One, he was an ardent racist. And number two, when the Origin of the Species appeared in 1859, he is vehemently opposed to it. Asa Gray, the curator of the herbarium, was Darwin's champion on campus.
[00:18:15.61] So Agassiz's star began to fall. Agassiz's star began to decline. And he decided that the Hail Mary pass that would save his reputation and put him at the forefront of science was to go to the Amazon. And that was the Thayer expedition, the greatest natural history expedition in the Amazon at that point. And here's the crew of people he took with him, some museum assistants and some graduate students.
[00:18:43.13] And the most important and interesting one is in the lower-left-hand corner. That's William James. William James became the father of psychology. James Hall is named for him. If you look at William James' Wikipedia page, it doesn't point out that he was in the Amazon and this was a formative experience.
[00:19:03.45] But hear me out on this. James was a rich, white Bostonian. He hung out with other rich, white Bostonians. But he went to the Amazon with Agassiz and hung out with forest Indians, Afro-Brazilians, Portuguese military, Brazilian government officials, and this amplified his life experience. This amplified his understanding of the human mind. And that Amazon experience is never credited in the biographies of this most fascinating man.
[00:19:33.51] And if you think it's too much of a stretch to talk about Schultes' cosmovision and James' cosmovision and the effect the Amazon rainforest and these sacred plants had on it, then read this paper by my pal Brian Farrell, who's next door at the MCZ, "The Biology of Consciousness from William James to Richard Schultes."
[00:19:52.50] Schultes' most important book-- which is the most important book I've ever read-- is Plants of the Gods written in collaboration with Albert Hoffman, the synthesizer of LSD. Why is it so important? Because it talks about the origin of culture. It talks about the origin of consciousness. It talks about the origin of religion. And it ties all of them back to these same sacred plants.
[00:20:14.73] So let's head south from here as Schultes did. When he finished his work in Mexico, he had a choice. He could work as a teacher in a private school here in New England or he could go to the Amazon in search of arrow poisons, then becoming important in Western medicine. He chose to head south.
[00:20:33.63] And one of the first tribes he focused on were the Kofáns, a very isolated and unique group who were famous arrow poison makers. The other plant he was in search of in terms of the Kofáns was yoco, a famous rainforest stimulant that nobody could identify.
[00:20:52.71] Well, he not only found many of these new arrow poisons, and subsequently had a student, Homer Pinkley, who focused even more on documenting the Kofán knowledge of curares, but he also was able to work with them on the Colombia side of the Colombia-Ecuador border, as you see here in the map and Brian will be telling you more about. He also found yoco.
[00:21:13.92] Yoco is a rainforest vine. You scrape it into cold water. You drink it, and your fingers begin to tingle. You vomit, and you feel like a million bucks all day long. You don't get hungry, and you don't get tired.
[00:21:28.23] But I want to use this as an example to tell you about the deprivation that Schultes suffered in the search for these plants and this knowledge. And ironically enough, this comes from a note that Schultes wrote in the Amazon for his Harvard alumni class newsletter.
[00:21:48.33] "Many a liana had I cut down, only to find it flowerless and without value for taxonomic study." Botanists need fruits and flowers to identify the species. "But all of the Indians in the upper Putumayo knew of my quest."
[00:22:00.36] "I decided to end my trip fruitlessly and return to Bogota. My legs were covered with ulcers from walking through swamps and from beriberi." And remember, there were no antibiotics. This in 1941, right, when Fleming was isolating penicillin. So having untreated ulcers could cost you an arm or a leg or your life. "When I arrived at the Colombian naval base on the river , the clean bunk felt regal."
[00:22:26.54] "Three days before the arrival of the plane that was supposed to take me back to Bogota, an Indian came paddling down with the news that he had located a flowering yoco. He assured me it was only four hours walk through the forest. I hesitated. The pains in my legs, I confess, nearly won out. But finally, I agreed to go, half expecting to find just one more flowerless liana."
[00:22:48.52] "It was a terrible pilgrimage of six or seven hours on foot, most of the time knee deep in water and mud. On arrival, I saw an enormously liana, the tiny flowers of which were strewn far and wide on the forest floor."
[00:23:02.57] "We had to fell seven trees before the treasure would fall into our laps, but that collection not only enabled us to identify an interesting drug, but provided us with a new species to science, which was described in the botanical museum leaflets of Harvard University." Schultes notebook, 1952. And thanks to Harvard, these notebooks are now online. And thanks to Brian, we're able to find these things and put them in the map he's going to be telling you about.
[00:23:27.29] This is the type specimen, the actual one that he had to cut down seven trees to collect. This is the holotype.
[00:23:35.42] So Schultes spent quite some time with the Kofáns and was a great photographer, as you'll see more of in the next presentation. But we have the great honor to work with the Kofáns today. They're still there. And work with them to create a medicinal plant sanctuary, the first one of its kind in the Amazon in 2008, 400 square miles of pristine rainforest protected. And yoco, the vine, is the keystone species being protected.
[00:24:05.14] Now, this has been described as the greatest photo of field biologists ever taken. This is Schultes in front of Cerro Campana in the Chiribiquete range. This is now, thanks to Schultes primarily, the largest national rainforest park in all of Amazonia.
[00:24:24.79] I spent many years trying to find out when this picture was taken. There were no detailed maps at the time. And towards the end of his life, I asked Schultes, where was that picture taken? And here's the note he sent me with some vague directions.
[00:24:38.05] Where is Cerro Campana? It's off the river Ajaju. But it took me four years of going through the archives here, going to the Royal Geographic Society in London, the Smithsonian archives, the Codazzi Institute in Bogota to be able to find it. And here it is. It's a picture I took an overflight just a couple of years ago, right where Schultes was.
[00:25:02.87] Speaking of Harvard and the Amazon, Schultes was not the first Harvard man to explore Chiribiquete. Oddly enough, it was Hamilton Rice who created the first map of Chiribiquete in 1907. Came back so inspired, he founded the Institute of Geography at Harvard. Where was it? Anybody? It's now the Yenching Library.
[00:25:30.14] Chiribiquete is important for many reasons. It is a fountain of biodiversity. It is home to the greatest collection of pre-Colombian paintings anywhere in the world-- thousands of them. Very few of them have been documented. And it's home to three isolated groups of indigenous peoples.
[00:25:53.53] The other experience that was formative in Schultes' life and career was the "Baile de Muneco," the sacred dance of the peach palm tree on the Mirití-Paraná [river] east of Chiribiquete. This is a dance which is to propitiate forest spirits, forest animals celebrating mother nature's bounty.
[00:26:17.72] And when I asked Schultes about this, he smiled and he said, "You know, it's two and a half days, the ceremony." And I said, "Two and a half days, so that's like, 9 to 5, 9 to 5, 9 to 12?" And he said, "No, it's 56 hours." And I said, "56 hours! How do they keep going?" He says, "Well, each dance in honor of a spirit or an animal or a fish or a plant. And they stop after that dance, and they take snuff."
[00:26:49.45] Now, as I said, Schultes inspired many people to follow in his footsteps. Looks like the same Yucuna, right?
[00:27:03.82] I want to close tonight with perhaps the greatest find of all. This is in the headwaters of the Sibundoy Valley, which are the headwaters of the Putumayo River, the most important river in the Colombian Amazon. And people sort of don't understand the complexity and the wonder of the Colombian Amazon. They think, well, it's just this little suburb of Brazil. The Colombian Amazon is bigger than New England, so I regard it as the top priority in the entire conservation world.
[00:27:33.24] So here is ayahuasca in flower, a great picture taken by my buddy, Stephen Foster. And here is the classic picture of Schultes collecting it with Salvador Chindoy. Salvador Chindoy, we call the first shaman. He was a Kamentsá shaman in the Sibundoy Valley. And he was the one that gave it to Schultes, which was the first record of a Western scientist going through the entire ceremony, collecting it, and finding it in flower, and writing the publication.
[00:28:02.69] Not only did Schultes collect Banisteriopsis caapi, the classic ayahuasca, but he found a completely new genus of ayahuasca with these Bara Maku, who were nomadic hunter gatherers. And one of the things that is very puzzling in the field of ethnobotany-- Schultes always said, "I never felt any effects from ayahuasca!" If you read the papers, he tells William Burroughs, "No, I just saw some colors!" But remember, Schultes was a little bit of a trickster.
[00:28:32.84] And I think he just didn't want to share his experience with people. And I can prove that he had experiences that he didn't share with people because I was talking to one of his colleagues in Bogota about this. And I said, "What it is about this, he never felt the effects?" He said, "Well, one week ago, right where you're sitting, right in that chair right here in Bogota, I had Schultes' beloved guide, Pedro Juajibioy from the Sibundoy Valley, and I asked him the same question."
[00:28:58.00] And he said, "It's not true. I was there the night that Salvador Chindoy, who was my teacher, my uncle, gave yage to Schultes. And he says, "Schultes sat there the whole night in the hammock, and he laughed, and he sang, and he told stories!" And so [asked Pedro], "What did he say? What did he say?" And Pedro said, "We don't know. It was all in English!"
[00:29:19.68] [LAUGHTER]
[00:29:21.59] Here is the classic account, the first real scientific account of yage ayahuasca. And not only was this published in this famous Botanical Museum Leaflet series read passionately by 32 people in the field, but it's now received the ultimate accolade. It not only has been the subject of a Supreme Court decision, but it's been a headline in "The Onion!"
[00:29:48.72] [LAUGHTER]
[00:29:57.50] And I just want to conclude about the role of ayahuasca in the modern world. I brought this shaman, an Inga related to the Kamentsá where Schultes first learned this plant and this wisdom. And somebody said to him, we were in Los Angeles meeting with the foundation, and the foundation guy said to the shaman, he said, "You go to medical school, right?" The shaman said, "No, I'm a medicine man. I'm a taita [shaman]. And he said, "Well, what could you know about healing?"
[00:30:25.98] And I was just stunned at his stupidity. And the shaman smiled, and he looked at me. He said, "Look, if you have a cut, go to a doctor." He said, "But many human afflictions or diseases of the heart, the mind, and the soul-- Western medicine can't touch it. With ayahuasca, I cure it!"
[00:30:48.59] So Schultes' legacy-- what is his legacy in a tangible sense? Chiribiquete-- it's the largest and most important national park in the Amazon. Also a World Heritage Site protecting enormous amounts of biodiversity, three isolated tribes of indigenous peoples, and the greatest treasure trove of pre-Colombian paintings anywhere on the planet.
[00:31:14.56] But what's his intangible legacy? What's his spiritual legacy? Respect for nature and respect for indigenous wisdom. If you believe that better stewardship of nature is both a scientific and a sacred duty, then Schultes lives. If you believe that mother nature is an almost inexhaustible source of wonder and healing, then Schultes lives. If you believe in the importance of protecting nature and doing it in partnership with our indigenous colleagues, then Schultes lives! Thank you very much.
[00:31:50.34] [APPLAUSE]
[00:32:07.06] Now you're in for a real treat. I want to turn it over to Brian Hettler, who not only is the cartographer who put this amazing piece of work together, but it was his idea in the first place. So Brian.
[00:32:20.55] [APPLAUSE]
[00:32:28.41] Hello, everybody. Thanks for being here tonight. It's an honor and a privilege to be speaking here at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I'm thrilled tonight to be unveiling the all new version of our interactive map journal of the Amazonian travels of Richard Evans Schultes. And this new release marks not only a significant upgrade to the project, but also the launch of the map on the virtual library of Banco de la Republica, the premiere museum institution in Colombia.
[00:32:53.11] The map is a tribute to the life and works of Dr. Schultes. It's a celebration of the indigenous cultures he visited. And it's an exploration of the history, geography, and biodiversity of South America. So I'm going to spend most of the time showing the map. But first, I want to talk a bit about what inspired us to do this, what we were trying to accomplish, and how we actually mapped out some of his travels.
[00:33:15.61] So Dr. Schultes' stories, research, photographs, and teachings have inspired countless young people to follow careers in the natural sciences, not only here at Harvard, but across the country. We've met many of them talking about this project. And in compiling Schultes' incredible tales of exploration into a compelling interactive online educational resource, we hope to engage new audiences to learn about the Amazon rainforest and the indigenous people that live there.
[00:33:42.64] We want to develop a new model for how the natural sciences can be presented and taught to new audiences. Our goal is to make these topics compelling and accessible to new audiences in an age of technology, mobile phones, internet, and short attention spans. And while technology can create many distractions, it can also create really exciting opportunities for educational experiences so they're visually engaging and full of multimedia.
[00:34:11.20] Another constant theme throughout this project was the attempt to tie together all these online archives that already exist. So there's vast amounts of information already online, including the incredible work done here at Harvard to digitize all of Schultes herbarium specimens and field notebooks. We wanted to try to create a new way for people to navigate through these archives using digital storytelling and the incredible story of Dr. Schultes, in essence using his story to create a virtual exploration of the Amazon rainforest.
[00:34:45.82] So what is the map? The map retraces Schultes' first 14 groundbreaking years of research and discovery in a fully interactive digital map. The map presents a guided tour of Schultes' travels, while also exploring topics as he encounters them in his travels. So we pulled together a lot of information from his academic writings, his popular works, and information directly from his field notebooks. It's all compiled into kind of a greatest hits of his research. We've also included research from the indigenous communities themselves.
[00:35:20.49] So in total, there are more than 40 topics to explore, direct links to the herbarium specimens and field notebooks. And all of it is pulled together into a cohesive interactive experience using the story map templates produced by the mapping company, Esri. So these templates are fantastic tools that enable our field focused conservation organization to create high quality communications pieces, like the one you'll be seeing tonight.
[00:35:49.45] So I'm going to talk a bit about my experience with Dr. Schultes. So all my experience has been through the lens of my work with Amazon Conservation Team, or ACT. For the past seven years, I've been working with ACT, traveling in South America, and making maps with indigenous communities. This is a workshop in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta with the Kogi people.
[00:36:12.89] The cultural maps made by these indigenous groups are vital tools for learning and the transmission of knowledge and also helping to convey the indigenous perspective of territory to Western audiences. In this photo, members of the Waurá tribe, on the Xingu River in Brazil are creating a cultural map of their lands, which is important because this is an area completely surrounded by soy farms and cattle ranching. So putting their information down on a map helps them express their use of the territory.
[00:36:43.45] We also help indigenous communities learn how to use technology for field data collection, which supports land titling processes and territorial monitoring strategies. And this is the kind of work that made me think about different ways that we can present natural history to the general public. And whereas most my job is bringing a little bit of technology to the rainforest, in this case, we tried to bring the rainforest to technology in an internet cloud-based mapping platform.
[00:37:15.32] So I first learn about Dr. Schultes from Mark as he shared stories around the office, much like we heard tonight. Mark's constant respect, adoration, and enthusiasm for Dr. Schultes as a professor and in person was clear from the beginning. One day soon after I started at ACT, Mark came to my office with the photo that we saw earlier of Schultes on top of Cerro Campana in the Chiribiquete Islands, and he asked me to try to find where it was.
[00:37:39.53] At this time, there were no maps of Chiribiquete. It was proved to be quite a challenging task that took us from the Library of Congress to the archives of the Augustin Codazzi in Bogota. I'll talk a bit about that later. And I have to admit, at first I didn't fully understand the importance of the research of a mid-20th century ethnobotanist. I come from a technical mapping background, and I didn't understand until my first trip to Colombia.
[00:38:05.34] Like Schultes, one of my first experiences in the field in Columbia was in Sibundoy, which is the valley we saw earlier surrounded by the Paramo ecosystem, which is a wet and windswept highland wetland, which you see here. So on Mark's recommendation, I brought with me a copy of One River by Wade Davis. And as I traveled through Sibundoy and Mocoa, living and working with the Inga and Kamentsá people and reading about Schultes' travels in the same area 70 years earlier, I felt really inspired.
[00:38:36.81] At the time, we were partnering with the indigenous groups of Sibundoy in the land titling process, which eventually created a protective ring of reserves around the valley totaling over 160,000 acres. We were also working with the Association of Indigenous Women to preserve the traditional knowledge and the plant medicines that they were using.
[00:38:57.31] So Schultes' story and research and Dr. Davis's writings helped me recognize the importance of ACT's work. I felt the spirit of Schultes' work and the spirit of our work in working closely with indigenous communities. It was also just a real thrill to be traveling in many of the places I was reading about, and I started to mark them down on a map as I recognized places that I traveled.
[00:39:17.02] Well, needless to say, I was hooked on the Colombian Amazon, the writings of Dr. Schultes, and just wanted to learn as much as I could. Thankfully, Mark's office is right down the hall, and he has a literal library of materials on everything about the Amazon and everything Schultes has ever written.
[00:39:32.78] So it became a fun game for Mark and I to try to find some of these locations. He'd come to my office, mention some place, and I'd try to find it. We started using the herbaria records. Soon we realized that there are these online databases with aggregated herbaria records from all over the country. We download a big spreadsheet and used that to map out his travels in granular detail.
[00:39:54.51] Then we realized that Harvard has done incredible work digitizing all these field notebooks. So then we started looking through all these different notebooks. In total, I think about 20 of his field notebooks we've fully reviewed. Now, they're a bit messy, but you can pull out really interesting information from within them.
[00:40:07.62] We cross-referenced those locations and placed names with the historical maps, like the Hamilton Rice map you see here. And then used modern technology, like satellite imagery, and digital elevation models to actually find some of these mountains and to mark down with a lot of precision where he was traveling. So in total, we've mapped over 400 time-location points that encompasses more than 1,000 botanical records. We've complemented this with other information from the botanical leaflets, his reports of the Rubber Reserve Company, and One River as well.
[00:40:45.89] And now to the map. These are the buttons to make data appear. So here you can see the extent of the Amazon rainforest using the RAISG definition. And these are the links that I was mentioning. So you can click on these links, and it actually shows the location. It brings up these pop-up windows. You can then click on a species name to go to a record for that plant.
[00:41:08.61] So this is the table of contents. In total, there are 41 sections of different topics covered. Pretty much every one of these topics has its own geospatial data. So this isn't just one map. In fact, this is over 40 maps to explore. You can see it covers everything from peyote to his trip down the Putumayo, his investigation of rubber, his descent to the Apaporis River, and his observations of the Kai-ya-ree dance and the Mirití-Paraná.
[00:41:38.21] As you can see, we've included a lot of great photos that have been provided by the Schultes family and never been seen. We try to trace his life from the beginning so you can actually see where he grew up, his university review, and some of these early photos.
[00:41:54.50] So the journal is designed in both style and form to kind of resemble a journal that he would have kept. So we tried to include information as he would have been researching a topic, kind of using different layers to focus the readers on different geographies. And we found some neat things through our research, for example, the actual note from Blas Pablo Reko that sent-- well, Schultes found this while researching peyote, and this is what sent him to Mexico to investigate the magic mushrooms.
[00:42:28.32] We always try to show the distribution of the indigenous groups, where they are. So we think this is really important to show people where the different groups some indigenous people are. We really want to raise awareness on this. Whoops. Hold on one second. I'm going to-- OK, there we go. OK, this much better. It's a mirrored screen now. OK, great.
[00:43:01.02] We also talk about his search for the hallucinogenic morning glories. And so this is a good example of how you can get this tactile feel of following Schultes on the map. So clicking on these links, you can actually follow his travels across the Sierra del Mazatec, see some of the plants he found along the way, up until the time where he finds the giant vine of Turbina corymbosa.
[00:43:30.35] OK, now to review some of the other content in the map. So in 1941, 26-year-old Richard Evans Schultes arrived at Colombia for the first time. He was on a mission to search for the arrow poisons that Mark mentioned earlier. So he started his research in the headwaters of the Putumayo River in the Sibundoy Valley. So not only do we try to talk about specific plants, but we like to show the distribution of ecosystems, for example, the distribution of Paramo ecosystems in southern Colombia.
[00:44:01.16] So this is data derived from advanced remote sensing done by Instituto Humboldt in Colombia. So you're actually able to see the distribution of the ecosystem, click on the location where he collected, click on the link, and see the specimen in incredible fidelity, as well. So just the work that Harvard has done to digitize all these, it's just incredible. Now, if I can get back to-- OK.
[00:44:40.41] So we try to talk a little bit about the history of the indigenous groups, show where their territory is, explain the geography of the indigenous people, for example, the sacred peaks around the Sibundoy Valley. So we found a lot of information as we were researching Schultes. Not all of it would fit in just a streamlined, easy-to-read story, so we made some optional sections for people that really want to get in the hardcore ethnobotany, look at species names, all that kind of information.
[00:45:06.83] So this is one of my favorite sections to put together because a lot of this is pulled right out of his field notebook from 1942 as he traveled with Salvador Chindoy, so a lot of new unpublished plant uses in here, like an orchid that cured a broken heart and another orchid that the indigenous people chewed to give them energy on long expeditions, and things like that. So we tried to pack as much important ethnobotany information in this product as we could.
[00:45:35.86] The theme of the Putumayo chapter is all these amazing plants that he encountered all along the way from borrachero. It tracks his descent down the Andes into the lowlands of the Amazon. And these links not only show some of these locations, but we also try to include maps of watersheds. So as he became to ascend the San Miguel Rio along the border of Colombia and Ecuador, you can actually click on the name of the river and see the watershed. So this is a way to learn geography, but it's also kind of interesting to see how much these rivers he explored. Like we can see here that he did a pretty thorough expedition through this area.
[00:46:23.14] We track his search for curare. I've included some maps showing maps from later research, for example, showing the distribution of different types of curare used by indigenous people in South America. Of course, talk about his experience with the yage. This is an interesting section because we actually have his notes here taken from a field notebook as he was having his first experiences with yage.
[00:46:48.18] We tried to make this a very immersive experience. We want people that kind of feel like they're in the Amazon, so we've included a lot of audio. Well, this is the yage chants of a Inga taitian in Colombia. It seems like the sound isn't currently working. OK, on to the next chapter.
[00:47:10.50] So our focus is really the indigenous people, and that's our expertise. But Schultes' research, he did too much about rubber to ignore, so we included some of this. This chapter is a bit different in structure. It includes a bit more exposition, kind of talking about the history of rubber, drawing from Schultes' research, of course.
[00:47:28.01] We tried to set the stage as Schultes was descending the Putumayo River in 1942. The Nazis were consolidating control of Europe, and the Japanese were attacking the European colonies in Southeast Asia, which is where 95% of the world's rubber supply was coming from. So this is the context that sent Schultes on his quest for rubber, which would frame his travels over the next decade.
[00:47:52.86] And so we talk about some of the early research done with Hevea, the atrocities of the rubber boom. We try to have some post-colonial perspective on these issues that show how different things affected indigenous communities, for example, how the territory occupied by Cesar Arana affected the Murui-Muinai or Huitoto communities. We also track how rubber first got to Southeast Asia. So we can see the odyssey of the cultivated rubber tree here.
[00:48:27.02] And then it kind of gets into Schultes' search for rubber. So again, it's sort of geographically we follow his research in the Colombian Amazon, for example his discovery of a new species of Hevea on the top of Cerro Chiribiquete. We'll talk about this area a bit more soon.
[00:48:44.62] His travels through Peru and southern Brazil. So here we can track him as he went from Lima to Cusco, Lake Titicaca, La Paz, and then down Rio Madeira in search of this rare variety of Hevea. So we've used recent papers that have done genetic testing and things like that, used the maps from some of those papers to actually show the distribution of different species of Hevea. Also, follow his quest for a few rare varieties in the headwaters of the Rio Negro as he's following in the footsteps of Richard Spruce.
[00:49:20.76] I think my favorite chapter of all these is the Apaporis. So this chapter deals a bit more with history and culture and explaining some of these aspects of indigenous cultures. So it starts with-- well, this is one of Schultes' first rubber missions. He started in the headwaters of the Magdalena River trying to cross over to the headwaters of the Caqueta, where he visited St. Augustin.
[00:49:43.43] So we're trying to set the stage here of northwest South America. It has a really complex mosaic of different pre-Colombian cultures. And for each of these, we always try to kind of frame it in geography of showing where the Caquetá River is, and then showing where its northernmost tributary, the Apaporis.
[00:50:05.98] So we're back to Chiribiquete. So this is kind of where it all started for us. As I said, we were trying to find Cerro Campana. And after years of research, we were finally able to find it, thanks to our Colombian colleagues. So currently, Amazon Conservation Team is working with the National Park Service in Colombia to research and protect the isolated indigenous groups of Chiribiquete.
[00:50:26.88] So actually, as some of my Colombian colleagues were flying over this national park, they had taken some photos. And they were able to positively identify this mountain. So at first, there was no high resolution imagery available for this area. But now we can see it all in 50 centimeter resolution imagery. So you can follow along his travels here in incredible detail.
[00:50:55.14] So I've included some of the artwork that he found. As he climbed Cerro Campana, he found pre-Colombian cave paintings. And we tried to make this an engaging interactive experience. And we've created some little games along the way. So this is a kind of an embedded app that allows you to search for hidden cave paintings, much like Schultes had done. So if you move around the spyglass, you can actually reveal the locations of cave paintings, which this information is taken from recent publications done by anthropologists that have worked in the park.
[00:51:28.21] We've also compiled a pretty thorough botanical record of Chiribiquete and tracked his movements as he ascended the Ajaju River. Some of the different plants he found, so tracks his movements up the Ajaju, all the way up to the Yaya-Ayaya and then back down. Included a lot of descriptions of plants that he found along the way, including what he called a grotesque orchid on top Cerro Castillo.
[00:52:03.16] So as Schultes was traveling through Chiribiquete, his guide was a Carijona Indian, or indigenous person. And they had dominated this area for a long time. But at the time Schultes was visiting, there were very few left, and they were dispersed and covering a wide area. So we tried to represent kind of the historical reduction of their territory using maps. So now, there's currently Carjonas communities on Puerto Nare, La Pedrera, and the lower Orteguaza River. You can actually read more about the Carijonas. We're fortunate to have worked with the Colombian historian who is the expert on this topic, so we try to provide as much of that information and kind of explain how Schultes was recording the information of a tribe that was kind of disappearing and wasn't as much an intact cultural entity at the time.
[00:52:57.07] So we've also tried to include some maps that have been elaborated by the indigenous communities themselves in recent years with the support of NGOs like GAIA Amazonas, who work in this region of the Apaporis. So in 1942, although he was low on supplies, Schultes paddled up the Pira Pirana River to the Rock Of Nyi, which is an important petroglyph along the river with mythical importance for the indigenous people.
[00:53:23.89] So this was one of the sites where the ancestral Anacondas had left the sacred artifacts. So you can actually see the map. So this is the indigenous perspective on how some of the spirits and the origins of their territory as these ancestral Anacondas migrated from the maloca at the mouth of the Amazon River up to the the territories on the Apaporis River. So we delve into the culture here, talking about the ceremonies of the Yurupari, including the Yurupari horn that Spruce had collected. So again, you can actually hear the horns by clicking on these audio buttons. So you can start to hear the pan flutes, the horns, and the sacred chanting, all of which is meant to cleanse and uphold what they view as a spiritual maloca and these spiritual thought lines that connect it all together.
[00:54:22.63] In the final chapter is about the dance of the spirits, or Kai-ya-ree where Schultes, in 1952, he had heard about this festival taking place on this small, isolated river, and he crossed over from the Apaporis to the Mirití-Paraná River. Also, this is a fun section to map because he had pretty detailed journals here. And by 1952, he is keeping more details than he had earlier in his career.
[00:54:48.82] So there's a lot of really interesting information in here, for example, his description of several of the Yucuna myths that were explained to him as he was paddling up in canoes. And we've included a lot of information directly from him here. Of course, all of his amazing photographs of the dance. And this section draws heavily on his paper, "Palms and Religion," where he describes the ceremony. And this is one example where that paper was never translated into Spanish. And once we translated it, we've actually seen this map get cited. So we're really happy to make this available to Spanish speaking audiences.
[00:55:25.33] So this part covers the ethnobotany of the dance, including the creation of the mask. So we've actually included some of the material heritage islands from the Peabody Museum. We want to include links directly to those sources so people can find them on the museum website. Still adding those and trying to find stable URLs, but the idea is always to direct people to the original sources of information, whether it be herbaria records, collections in Peabody or the field notebooks themselves.
[00:55:59.24] So we're going to be launching this, I think, early next week. I encourage you all to check it out when it's live. I think we'll be promoting on Amazon Conservation Team's social media. And I think through Harvard, we'll try to spread the word as well.
[00:56:17.76] And also, if you like this map, I encourage you to look at some of our other story maps that have been made. We've covered topics ranging from extractive industries, environmental threats, advanced remote sensing. We talk about some of our indigenous land rights, successes in Colombia, and another one following the story of an indigenous cartographer in Suriname.
[00:56:41.75] So in conclusion, I think what we are done with this project is really just scratching the surface of the potential to create new, engaging learning experiences about the natural sciences and kind of changing how we interact with archival materials. So in my opinion, the natural and social sciences are criminally undervalued in our modern society. In an era of climate change and rapid acculturation, it's urgently important that we improve how we communicate science research in order to engage new audiences and inspire people to follow careers in these fields, just like Schultes did.
[00:57:20.74] So I invite you, everybody in this room and watching at home, to consider how tools and platforms like you've seen here today can be applied to your respective fields to communicate the important research that you're all doing. And I'd suggest that we can take the use of archival material one step farther by mobilizing these collections and bringing them back to the indigenous communities themselves, some of whom have lost these practices in the intervening years.
[00:57:45.15] So let's put these are archival materials to good use, help communities reclaim this knowledge, and protect our territories. And where better to discuss these ideas than at Harvard, the central institution that connects everything from the vast archives of research, the herbaria records, the material cultural heritage collections. And with Harvard's strong influence in Latin America, and as we've seen in the Amazon region, this university is uniquely positioned to promote and enact these ideas to help conserve the Amazon and other vitally important ecosystems.
[00:58:24.42] Just a few acknowledgments about some of the photos that were used. And thank you.
[00:58:29.80] [APPLAUSE]